Inventive problems

Following World War II, the high quality, technologically advanced products of the United States dominated world markets. With the oil shock of the 1970s, however, many of the economic advantages associated with cheap petroleum were lost and the recovered economies of Europe and Asia emerged as strong competitors in many product areas. The innovative technologies of the US could no longer insulate industries from the customer oriented approaches of European and Asian producers.

Globalization wrote: “...the speed by which your latest invention can be made obsolete or turned into a
commodity is now lightening quick. Therefore, only the paranoid, only those who are constantly looking
over their shoulders to see who is creating something new that will destroy them and then staying just one
step ahead of them, will survive.

Innovation is central to business success, yet no other aspect of business is as frustrating and out of control. Instead of occurring in fits and starts and strokes of genius, innovation needs to become an all-the-time event that’s measurable, reliable, predictable, streamlined, and effective. Asserting that every innovation objective has a finite set of possible solutions given its unique constraints, TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is a structured system for making innovation more manageable and profitable. ...

Two months ago, three agri-biotechnology experts namely Dr. Marc Van Montagu, MaryDel Chilton and Dr. Robert T. Fraley have been hailed as the 2013 World Food Prize (WFP) Laureates [8]. They are the pioneers in inventing transgenic plants through a natural tool called Agrobacterium tumefaciens. What do you think about this news? Their invention has become an effective tool to change the world or destroy the world – it is still a question without the final answer.

Chapter 13W - Technology, R&D, and efficiency. This chapter addresses the firm’s ability to determine its optimal amount of research and development (R&D) and how entrepreneurs and innovators further technological advances. Many of today’s companies like Nike, Intel, and Wal-Mart owe much of their success to technological advances; differentiating with invention, innovation, and technological diffusion.

Chapter 11 - Technology, R&D, and efficiency. In this chapter, students will be able to understand: Invention, innovation, and technological diffusion; furthering technological advance; optimal amount of R&D; benefits from innovation; market structure and technological advance; technological advance and efficiency.

There are many problems with this approach:
the semantics is encoded into text formatting tags; l
there is no means of checking that a recipe is encoded correctly; l
it is difficult to change the layout of recipes (CSS is not enough). l
It would be much better to invent a special recipe markup language:

Britain's motor industry today employs a million people. However the industry which has shown such
brilliant inventiveness over the century now faces its biggest challenge: to ensure a future of growth without
pollution. The problem facing Britain is that millions rely on the car because there is no viable alternative.
After 100 years, what is the future of the car? We have asked the experts, now let us know what the
ordinary motorist thinks.

Genetic programming (GP) is a branch of Evolutionary Computing that aims the automatic discovery of programs to solve a given problem. Since its appearance, in the earliest nineties, GP has become one of the most promising paradigms for solving problems in the artificial intelligence field, producing a number of human-competitive results and even patentable new inventions. And, as other areas in Computer Science, GP continues evolving quickly, with new ideas, techniques and applications being constantly proposed....

For a timely answer to the question of sustainability, or how to provide for future generations, there
needs to be shared accounting of our social and physical resources. Supply chain transparency makes it
possible to map resource flows and ensure dependable production while avoiding social and environmental
problems. Open channels of communications can support a collective effort to account for the
impacts of supply chains and engage more people in the invention of long-term solutions, or sustainable
design....

The problem of “Protecting Intellectual Property” ranks as the 67 most severe problem
for small-business owners, five positions lower than in 2008 where it ranked 62nd
. Just under 5
percent find it to be a critical problem compared to 34 percent who do not find it a problem
at all. Small businesses invent and improve on processes and products to enhance productivity
and market share.

THE FACSIMILE MACHINE
Although the facsimile machine was invented in the 1840s, it remained largely a device used in the newspaper industry for the transmission of pictures until the mid1980s. There were several reasons for this; some were technical and the others commercial. The technical problems which held up the development of the fax machine are illustrated in Figure 10.1. For simplicity we use the letter H and assume that scanning is carried out horizontally from the top left side to the right. ...

On 21 March 1990 John Hammersley celebrates his seventieth birthday.
A number of his colleagues and friends wish to pay tribute on this
occasion to a mathematician whose exceptional inventiveness has greatly
enriched mathematical science.
The breadth and versatility of Hammersley’s interests are remarkable,
doubly so in an age of increased specialisation. In a range of highly individual
papers on a variety of topics, he has theorised, and posed (and solved)
problems, thereby laying the foundations for many subjects currently under
study.

Twenty-five years ago, Georges Köhler and César Milstein invented a means of
cloning individual antibodies, thus opening up the way for tremendous advances in the
fields of cell biology and clinical diagnostics (1). However, in spite of their early
promise, monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) were largely unsuccessful as therapeutic
reagents resulting from insufficient activation of human effector functions and
immune reactions against proteins of murine origin.

Ready to join the personal fabrication movement? This hands-on book shows you how to make a wide variety of physical objects with the amazing MakerBot 3D printer.
It’s handy when you need a replacement for something lost, broken, or no longer made—like a knob on your stove. You can make things instead of buying them, or solve problems with inventions of your own. The possibilities are endless, and MakerBot is the fun, affordable, and inspiring way to go. Get started with your own little factory today!
...

Any book that covers a broad range of topics will likely harbor some problems with
notation and symbology. This results from having the same symbol used in different areas
to represent different quantities, and also from having too many quantities to represent.
Rather than invent new symbols, we choose to stay close to the standards and warn the
reader about any symbol used to represent more than one distinct quantity.

When man invented the wheel, he very quickly learned that if it wasn’t
completely round and if it didn’t rotate evenly about it’s central axis, then
he had a problem!
The wheel would vibrate, causing damage to itself and it’s support
mechanism and in severe cases, be unusable. As the task of
manufacturing a replacement was so huge and time consuming, a method
had to be found to minimize the problem. Research showed that the wheel
and its shaft had to be in a state of balance, i.e.

We know how to fix the problem of childhood hunger,
and we have an opportunity now to build a prosperous
future for us all by doing that. Over the past century
Americans have built marvelous networks and systems
of infrastructure that are necessary to our economy
and quality of life. Through creativity, inventiveness,
ingenuity and hard work we have made our country a
model of success in many areas. For example, we have
built a national power grid, telecommunication systems,
water systems, transportation systems, and internet
systems that are peerless, to list just a few.

Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented. They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem—a problem which is genuine just because the elements, taken as they stand, are conflicting. Any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from another 4 point of view, and hence in a fresh light. But this reconstruction means travail of thought. ...